Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Released in 2013 and co-directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn Davis is a character study set against the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s. The period is a specific and evocative one: a moment just before Bob Dylan arrived and changed everything, when earnest young musicians were playing small clubs, sleeping on other people's sofas, and wondering whether talent alone was ever going to be enough. The film follows Llewyn Davis, a gifted but restless folk singer trying to keep his head above water in that world, and it takes a deliberately episodic, almost circular approach to telling his story. Produced through StudioCanal and Mike Zoss Productions among others, it runs a lean 105 minutes and carries no tidy resolution. This is not a film that wraps things up, and that is entirely by design.

The Coens arrived at this project with an already formidable body of work behind them. If you have read the site's reviews of Fargo (1996), Barton Fink (1991), or Burn After Reading (2008), all directed by Ethan Coen, you will have a sense of the range these two bring to their work: dark comedy, period atmosphere, characters who are brilliant and self-defeating in equal measure. Inside Llewyn Davis sits closer to the quieter, more melancholy end of that range. The film was loosely inspired by the life of folk musician Dave Van Ronk and drew on the cultural memory of that Greenwich Village scene rather than following any strict biographical line. T Bone Burnett, who had previously worked with the Coens on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, handled music production, which goes some way to explaining why the folk performances feel so lived-in and genuine.

Leading the film is Oscar Isaac, who performs his own songs and carries almost every scene. Isaac had been building a steady and varied career before this, appearing in films as different as A Most Violent Year (2014) and later the science-fiction thriller Ex Machina (2015), but Inside Llewyn Davis is often cited as the performance that announced him as a major screen presence. Carey Mulligan plays Jean, a fellow folk musician whose exasperation with Llewyn is both comic and painful, and Justin Timberlake appears as her more commercially minded partner. John Goodman rounds out the principal cast in a memorable supporting turn. The ensemble is polished but understated, with the film never pushing its performances into the kind of big moments that tend to win awards. It took the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2013, which felt like the right kind of recognition for a film that works on patience and accumulation rather than dramatic peaks.

Now I get it. I'm a huge Coen Brothers fan so the first time I watched this movie I was wholly disappointed. It just felt like a movie about nothing. Now, rewatching 10+ years later or whatever I get it. It's not a story about a struggling musician, it's a story about a man struggling with grief. As good as Oscar Isaac is, it's John Goodman and Carey Mulligan who steal the show. The soundtrack is incredible, as expected from a folk movie. Would highly recommend this movie.

I think that shift in how you read the film, from a story about professional failure to something far more personal and grief-stricken, is what makes it worth revisiting. A lot of films reward a second watch for purely structural reasons, but this one rewards it emotionally. Knowing what is underneath Llewyn's behaviour reframes every scene, including some that seemed almost throwaway the first time around. The cat, the wandering, the way he keeps arriving back at the same doors: it all lands differently. The folk music helps too, not as backdrop but as something that carries real weight in the telling. If you have been sleeping on this one, or if like me you bounced off it the first time, give it another go.

Rating: ★★★★  | Year: 2013  | Watched: 2025-04-05

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) on YouTube

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